Monday, 14 April 2008

Exploring YouTube

I've never really bothered much with YouTube. Clips get sent to my Facebook superwall which I may or may not watch, and that's about it. But the Liverpool Daily Post site is hugely popular, and I figured that I ought to at least try and understand how YouTube works - and why it works.
So I'm now a YouTuber - in fact, I'm here should anyone care - and I was surprised at how simple it was to set up. I started off by uploading a couple of videos of my cat Nyx (already a star of Qik, Flickr, this blog and Utterz) and then sent out a tentative request to friends to give me some feedback.
Then I linked to two friends already established on YouTube - Mark and Sion - and the LDP site, of course.
Then I uploaded some more videoes, and noticed that when my cat video was playing others of cats were being recommended alongside it. So I wandered off into YouTube and lost two hours of my life watching other people's stories being played out on my laptop.
It was fascinating, although not as addictive as Qik which has the added unpredictability that comes with live streaming. I watched some Vespa-riding US eco-guy streaming in the wilderness yesterday just to see if a bear would come along and eat him. It didn't.
But life is never simple is it? Now I want to embed Qik films I've taken on the N95 onto YouTube and I CANNOT work out how to do it. Honestly, social networking can be bloody hard work sometimes...
But, because you can never have too many clips of a cat playing with a tap, I've embedded Nyx here :D